Trans servicemen and women have been invisible for too long. When will that end?
Photograph: David Furst/AFP/Getty Images

When I wanted to serve my country, I was forced to hide the most basic and human aspect of my life and my identity from the people to whom I was supposed to be the closest – and with whom I had to trust my life. I also had to hide from myself.

Every morning, I had to put on a uniform, and a disguise, because I was transgender, and I am a soldier.

By December 2009, I had come to terms with my gender identity just as I was deployed to Iraq. And while being in a combat zone and watching the casualty numbers tick by on my work station made questions like As what gender do you identify? feel as though they ought to be increasingly irrelevant, I still had to actively work to suppress my gender identity or risk being kicked out of the military or even physical harm from anyone who might’ve harbored prejudice against trans people.

I was also unable to seek mental health and medical treatment, for fear of administrative or criminal actions being taken against me if I admitted that I was trans. And so, by default, I was unable to receive any treatments to keep me healthy, mentally and physically.

The regulations under which I served, and which Defense Secretary Ash Carter has finally announced that he intends to change, psychopatholigizes the entire trans community, describing us as having “manifestations of […] paraphilias, […] psychosexual conditions, transsexual, [and] gender identity disorder to include major abnormalities or defects of the genitalia such as change of sex or a current attempt to change sex,” which, as per military code, “render an individual administratively unfit” to serve.

In other words, the military has long classified being trans as a mental disorder that should immediately disqualify someone from serving their country, no matter the skills and capabilities that person brings to the table.

I was not alone as a trans person in the military in 2009, and I’m not alone now: a study by the University of California Los Angeles’ Williams Institute found that trans people serve in the military at double the rate of the general population. All told, the Williams Institute estimates that 134,300 trans veterans have served in the US Armed Forces, and that 15,500 trans people are currently serving overseas or at home.

Forcing us to keep our identities to a secret in order to serve our country harmed all of us in some way, and it harms the unity and cohesion on which the military and the men and women who serve in it require. It forces thousands to live in secrecy and fear, and the pain of hiding my truth continues to haunt me to this day. Plus, I felt distant and disconnected from the others in my unit because I was trans and couldn’t serve openly, and that distance separated me from the rest of the “team”.

But while inclusion is an important first step, it is far from the last. Trans people who serve in secret also face systematic hostility, from identification requirements that may not reflect their lived genders to uniform restrictions that make it difficult to effectively transition. The policy changes Carter is planning to study must to ensure trans service members and veterans can access medical care they need, as well as identification and clothing that reflects who they are. Without those changes, lifting the ban on trans service members would be a predominantly hollow victory.

The task of eliminating entrenched prejudice is daunting, but it is one that the military has taken on before, as in the racial and gender integrations of the last century. I believe the US Armed Forces are more than capable of overcoming such obstacles again. Those who want to serve should have the right to do so without living in constant fear and secrecy.

With both an end to the ban and the appropriate policy changes, as the largest employer in the country, the US military could be instrumental in providing jobs – and job security – to trans service members, as well as setting an important precedent in a country that still doesn’t offer legal protection from employment discrimination to trans people nationwide. Though there are plenty of reasons to critique US foreign policy, and the way in which the US military enacts it, serving your country has long been a way for economically marginalized Americans to get an economic step up – and could be for trans people as well.